Indigenous elders in the Northern Territory are trying to save their endangered language using a smart phone app and crowdsourcing software.

Fewer than 100 people speak Marrithiyel, which is part of the Tyikim language group and spoken in regions southwest of Darwin.

Dr Linda Ford's mother - a Marrithiyel speaker - died in 2007 and asked her to maintain the Tyikim languages.

"That's one of the languages that we were taught from the day we were born, probably before we were born, because they would've been singing to us in their tummies," the Charles Darwin University research fellow said.

"One of the things that my mother had instructed my brothers and sisters was to make sure that our languages and culture were maintained at the level that she handed them on, before she passed away.

"Not just for the Tyikim people, but for all people, particularly the Australian people, so they know that there are other languages and cultures that exist in this country."

App could help other Indigenous languages

Australian National University linguist Bruce Birch has spent more than a decade documenting endangered languages in north-west Arnhem Land.

A lot of people were displaced, and dispossessed - they find it difficult to come back onto country, because they don't know the language, they don't know the people. So this is another way to open up that access for them.

Dr Linda Ford, linguist

He is one of several linguists helping Dr Ford with the project.

"Minjilang on Croker Island is where it all started," he said.

"It's actually gone out to other parts of Australia and the world.

"I was in Portugal doing a workshop five weeks ago, we've had a trial in Cameroon, we've had a trial with a language in Papua New Guinea.

"The idea is that people in remote locations can get involved in the language documentation process, without there needing to be any specialists there."

The project team recently travelled to Belyuen and a nearby outstation to record elders speaking and testing the technology. There they took part in a long neck turtle and magpie goose hunting trip, and these became the subject of recorded stories.

"We used that as the data to support what we were putting onto the computer, the hunting experience itself," Dr Ford said.

There were more than 500 dialects and 250 distinct languages spoken by Australia's Indigenous population at the time of European settlement, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates.

Now about 120 of these languages remain, and of these 13 are considered strong, according to the Second National Indigenous Language report published by Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).